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Wasn’t Wisconsin Wonderful?

This June may be one of the most pivotal months in years. It started with the disastrous jobs report and subsequent market fall, and continued with the victory of free markets and free peoples in yesterday’s Wisconsin recall vote. As the month continues there is an election next week for the congressional seat vacated by Gabriel Giffords. We could also see the collapse of the EU. And later we will learn of the Supreme Court’s decisions on healthcare and Arizona’s immigration law. In the healthcare case, the Court might protect our freedoms using the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Almost 80 years ago the Court used the Commerce Clause in the case of the Schechter Brothers of Brooklyn. The Freeman tells the story of four Jewish brothers who stood in the way of the beginnings of FDR’s New Deal.

Roosevelt created the National Recovery Administration (NRA) to enforce the NIRA’s provisions. It wrote or helped industries and labor write “codes” that governed production, prices, and labor relations. The AAA was a similar attempt to plan agricultural production. In the name of keeping prices up for farmers, millions of piglets were slaughtered and millions of acres of cotton were plowed under—while large numbers of Americans were hungry and cold.

Stores displayed the NRA “Blue Eagle” sign to show they were abiding by the codes, and consumers were encouraged to patronize only companies that did so. Thousands of inspectors checked for code compliance and initiated prosecutions against violators. Enter the Schechters.

The four brothers were born in Hungary before their parents made their way to the United States. With heavily accented, broken English, they were right out of central casting for the oft-stereotyped immigrant Jewish rube—and the Roosevelt administration treated them that way. The Yiddish version of their last name, Shochet, is also the word for their profession: butcher. More specifically, they were poultry middlemen, buying chickens from across the country, then butchering and selling them to the New York City market, mostly to retailers who then sold directly to consumers. Middlemen of course were exactly the sort of “problem” the NRA was designed to deal with, because in the eyes of the FDR crowd they profited off consumers while providing little in return. Additionally, prejudice against middlemen has been historically difficult to disentangle from anti-Semitism, since Jews have long performed this role and borne the brunt of ignorance about how trade creates value.

Most important to the story is that the Schechters ran a kosher butcher business. The Jewish laws of kashrut serve many purposes. Among them they specify how to safely kill and dispose of animals so as to avoid a variety of possible diseases. Also, they enforce a set of ethical obligations about how to treat animals that we kill and eat. The provisions about how to kill animals and what can and cannot be eaten helped the community avoid potentially unhealthy practices (and animals) and signaled that the animals sold had been inspected by recognized community authorities—namely rabbis trained to ensure that sellers followed the biblical rules. A certified kosher butcher has the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval from the most respected members of the local community.

Tuberculosis was the major issue with chickens, making it crucial to inspect the lungs to make sure they were smooth and therefore healthy. The word glatt in the phrase glatt kosher means “smooth,” which assures buyers no signs of tuberculosis were found. Importantly, customers at kosher butcheries could choose the birds they bought, which gave them the ability to enforce kashrut through their buying choices. So even if the birds were certified kosher by a rabbinical authority, customers could still exercise their own judgment about the quality of the chickens. Kosher butchers allowed this as a way to attract customers.

The problem for the Schechters was that Section 2, Article 7 of the NRA’s Code of Fair Competition for the Live Poultry Industry of the Metropolitan Area in and about the City of New York, which sounds like something out of Atlas Shrugged, mandated “straight killing,” which meant that customers could not select specific birds out of a coop. Instead they had to select a coop or half coop entirely. The code thus directly contradicted kashrut. This put the Schechters in an untenable position: Abide by the New Deal or abide by kashrut. Do the former and lose your customers. Do the latter and get arrested.

In June 1934 the Roosevelt administration expanded NRA inspections, and prosecutions began in earnest. The poultry industry was targeted because of alleged corruption. It is worth noting that corruption was not alleged to have caused the Great Depression, and the law said little about it. As is often the case, power assumed by the government for one purpose is very easy to use for other, more nefarious purposes.

Jennifer Rubin speculates on what follows a Walker win.

In all likelihood, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) will survive the recall tonight and become an unlikely rock star on the right. As Churchill said, “There is nothing more invigorating than to be shot at without result.”

The consequences of a Walker win may not be fully appreciated. So we’ll get the ball rolling:

1. Wisconsin becomes a key swing state, causing panic among those pundits who declared that Mitt Romney’s path to 270 electoral votes is “very narrow.”

2. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) zooms to the top of the VP list on the arguments that he’s so much less boring than the other front-runners, he can lock up Wisconsin, and the Ryan-Biden VP debate would be comedy gold, raising the question: After 30 minutes, should there be a mercy rule? …

Juan Williams writes on the meaning of the Wisconsin vote.

Ann Coulter on the right and Rachel Maddow on the left agree Wisconsin’s vote this Tuesday on recalling Gov. Scott Walker is going to have national implications.

They’ve got that right.

If Walker wins, it will encourage Republican governors around the nation to enact more laws that diminish the power of public worker unions. Those efforts usually involve stripping unions of collective bargaining rights in an effort to shut off the money flowing from unions to Democrats.

Since the 2010 midterm elections, GOP governors have been intent on closing off the flow of cash from taxpayers to public sector unions which then support Democratic candidates.

In trying to choke the life out of unions, those governors have had varied degrees of success.

But if Walker wins, governors like Michigan’s Rick Snyder, Ohio’s John Kasich and Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett will find new pockets of money and political support for their anti-union fight.

By the same logic, if the unions cannot defeat an unpopular GOP governor whose policies have threatened their power – and their very existence in one of the most pro-union states in the country – Republicans and Democrats alike will perceive them as weak.

The state’s labor unions – including the AFL-CIO, AFSCME and the SEIU – could not get their favorite candidate, Kathleen Falk, nominated as the candidate to run against Walker. …

Allysia Finley tells us why Rahm Emanuel may be rooting for a Walker Wisconsin win.  

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel helped raise money for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a fellow Democrat who is trying to unseat Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in today’s recall election. But part of Mr. Emanuel may be developing an appreciation for some of the Republican governor’s reforms. The Chicago school district and teachers union can’t agree on a new contract. The biggest roadblock? Collective bargaining, the same issue that sparked the Wisconsin recall effort.

The union is demanding a 30% raise over the next two years and class sizes capped at 23 students. Mr. Emanuel wants to give teachers a 2% raise next year and establish a merit pay pilot program. …

You may remember the Dem polling outfit PPP said Sunday Walker had only a 3% lead. Nice job PPP! Does that stand for Pretty Putrid Polling? Ed Morrissey has the story.

What to think of the latest PPP poll in Wisconsin?  On one hand, a narrow lead within the margin of error on the day before an election might signal a slight and final shift in momentum in Tom Barrett’s favor.  On the other, PPP is a Democratic pollster who might be looking for the best possible take on the race — and having the Democrat down three as a best case would be a positive for supporters of Scott Walker.  The Hill reports on the results:

A new poll finds Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker with a narrowed lead over Democratic challenger Tom Barrett ahead of Tuesday’s recall vote.

A Public Policy Polling survey released Monday shows Walker with the support of 50 percent of likely voters, ahead of Milwaukee Mayor Barrett at 47 percent.

The Economist has pointed words about Obama’s class war rhetoric.

… Mr Obama has even managed to choke out a few kind words about private equity, which, he says, is “a healthy part of the free market”, manned, in many cases, by “folks who do good work”. He claims he has no problem with the industry itself, but simply does not consider it a good proving ground for future presidents (unlike, say, community organising). Mr Romney’s contention that his experience in business will help him get the jobless back to work is flawed, Mr Obama’s argument runs, since private equity exists “to maximise profits, and that’s not always going to be good for communities or businesses or workers”.

The disclaimers are more than a little disingenuous, since Mr Obama often does seem to suggest that financiers are greedy wreckers from whom America’s economy must be saved. But that aside, and in spite of the Republicans’ bluster, his rhetoric is hardly illegitimate or extreme. America’s middle class is struggling. Median incomes are stagnant, while the rich have been getting richer. It is easy to argue that the average Joe is not getting a fair shake—or at least not the same shake he used to. The question is whether voters care most about that, or whether they simply want to see the economy humming again, equitably or not.

In that case, the election will revolve not around fairness, but competence. Mr Romney is fond of saying that Mr Obama has no idea how the economy works and how jobs are created. The way the Obama campaign talks about Bain Capital suggests that his criticism is correct. Mr Obama, as noted above, likes to insinuate that there is a conflict between pursuing profits and creating jobs. In the long run, however, in a competitive economy, that is nonsense. Only profitable firms can sustain any jobs, and the more profitable they are, the more money they have to invest in new ventures with new workers. Mr Obama is guilty not of rhetorical excess but of economic muddle. That is far more worrying.

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Great summary of the Wisconsin issues and lessons from John Fund.

It looks as if Governor Scott Walker will survive Tuesday’s recall vote. The Real Clear Politics average of recent polls has him leading Milwaukee’s Democratic mayor Tom Barrett by 6.6 points. As of late Sunday, the betting site Intrade was predicting that Walker has a 94.5 percent chance of becoming the victor. Even Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is now saying the recall wasn’t smart. “Don’t get an election that’s divisive, that may have an influence on the presidential election,” he told MSNBC last week. “We made a mistake doing that.”

If the recall fails, what will be the takeaways from the 17 months of pitched war that Wisconsin has endured since Governor Walker proposed his dramatic reforms of pensions and privileges in the state’s public-sector unions?

Expect the Left to Blame Obama
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times dismissed Obama on Sunday as someone who “prefers to float above, at a reserve, in grandiose mists.” When the likes of Dowd are no longer feeling the love, we shouldn’t be surprised that other Democrats are dumping on Obama for not showing up to help Barrett in Wisconsin. “Progressive Pundits Lay Groundwork to Blame Obama if Wisconsin Recall Fails” was the headline of a searing critique by Noah Rothman at Mediaite. He quoted Ed Schultz of MSNBC sarcastically noting that the president was in neighboring Iowa and Minnesota last week and that his campaign office is in nearby Chicago. “It’s all around, but is it in?” Schultz asked of the Obama campaign. “[Union members] want him on that line because he talked about being on that line with them back in 2007.” Schultz closed his plea for an Obama visit by saying it is the “job of a leader” to motivate his followers.

Liberals view Wisconsin as a state that is “leading the way in reshaping American’s view of the role of government,” Rothman emphasizes. “President Obama has abandoned that fight, noting correctly that it is not likely to be won,” he says. “But progressive pundits . . . are right — this is not just another election. . . .  It is a fight with broad implications that President Obama has abandoned. The question now becomes, can they [progressives] forgive this betrayal ahead of a tough election in the fall?”

Wisconsin Is Now in Play for November
The state hasn’t voted Republican since Ronald Reagan’s reelection effort in 1984, and Obama won it easily by 14 points in 2008. But the state can be competitive. Both Al Gore and John Kerry carried it by only a handful of votes — many of which may have been fraudulent, as a 2007 Milwaukee Police Department report showed. …

Buzz Feed attempts to quantify Wisconsin’s results.

… The key to this election, however, is not really whether Governor Walker wins. More or less everyone expects him to do that. The key is how much he wins by. The crude calculation is this: Walker defeat equals certain Obama win in November. Walker win by 1-5 percentage points equals very close presidential general election (nationally). A Walker win by 6 points or more equals Mitt Romney is the favorite to win in November.

The entire political world will be running the numbers Tuesday night. Truly important elections don’t come along that often. This one matters.

Jennifer Rubin dreams up excuses for the recall proponents.

It seems that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is heading for a win in the recall election. It is essential for the left to come up with excuses to avoid the obvious conclusions one would draw from a Walker victory, namely that this recall business was a monumentally dumb idea and that public-employee unions aren’t nearly as popular as Democrats believe.

I will save the excuse-mongers some time. Here is a handy list of rationalizations:

1. Walker didn’t win by as much as some thought he would, so the election is a big win for recall advocates.

2. The recall proponents were outspent.

3. Did we mention the recall proponents were outspent? …

Ms Rubin posts on the reality that is closing in on America’s left.

What does it say when:

The left dubs Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s collective bargaining reforms to be an abomination and mounts a recall effort .?.?. and union membership drops like a stone while a large majority of voters thinks that those reforms are working just fine?

The left insists for three years that massive borrowing, Obamacare, the constant threat of tax hikes, reams of new regulations and refusal to address the drivers of our debt won’t hobble the economy and . . . we are at 8.2 percent unemployment and less than 2 percent growth?

The left concocts a “war on women” and . . . women voters flock to Romney?

The left in revulsion over the Bush “freedom agenda” calls for cordial engagement of North Korea, Russia, Iran and Syria and . . . the Green Revolution is dormant, Iran and North Korea speed ahead with their nuclear weapons programs, Bashar al-Assad is in power and 13,000 Syrians are dead?

The left is convinced that the Constitution allows Congress to do any purportedly virtuous thing that pops into its collective mind .?.?. and the Supreme Court is poised to invalidate all or some of the left’s crowning legislative achievement?

Hmm. It might just be that many assumptions held by liberal politicians and parroted by the left punditocracy are substantively unsound and at odds with the convictions of large majorities of Americans. …

Michael Barone thinks the country looks like Texas, not CA.

… California is likely to grow more slowly than the nation, for the first time in history, and could even start losing population. 

Fortunately, governors of some other high-tax states are itching to cut taxes. The shale oil and natural gas boom have job seekers streaming to hitherto unlikely spots like North Dakota and northeast Ohio. Great Plains cities like Omaha, Neb., and Des Moines, Iowa, are looking pretty healthy too.

It’s not clear whether Atlanta and its smaller kin — Charlotte and Raleigh, N.C., Nashville, Tenn, Jacksonville, Fla. — will resume their robust growth. They’ve suffered high unemployment lately.

But Texas has been doing very well. If you draw a triangle whose points are Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, enclosing Austin, you’ve just drawn a map of the economic and jobs engine of North America. 

Texas prospers not just because of oil and gas, but thanks to a diversified and sophisticated economy. It has attracted large numbers of both immigrants and domestic migrants for a quarter-century. One in 12 Americans lives there.

America is getting to look a lot more like Texas, and that’s one trend that I hope continues. 

Turns out Elizabeth Warren was making a small fortune trading foreclosed and distressed properties in Oklahoma. Howie Carr has the details.

If there’s anything Granny Warren hates more than a fake Indian or a plagiarist, it’s one of these damn real-estate speculators buying up the hammered middle class’ homes and flipping them for big bucks.

Unless, of course, Granny is the hypocrite conniving with the banks to do the hammering and the hacking.

Granny wrote in 2000 that foreclosure sales “are notorious for fetching low prices.” And boy, would she know.

Here’s a foreclosed property she picked up in Oklahoma City at 2123 NW 14th St. for $4,000 in 1993. She transferred it to her brother and his wife in March 2004 and they sold it for $30,000 in February 2006.

Those kinds of returns make you a 1 percenter like Granny. That, and cashing in on a racial spoils system you have no business taking advantage of.

The prior owners of the $4,000 house were Richard and Shelley Walter, who had a son who served as a Marine in Iraq. I wonder if they’ve read Granny’s impassioned attacks on foreclosures: “Foreclosure rates are skyrocketing. Is it a civil right to lose that home in a sheriff’s auction?” ..

The Boston Herald says now Indians are angry at Lie-awatha.

Native Americans — outraged by Elizabeth Warren’s admission yesterday that she told her Ivy League bosses about her purported tribal roots — accused the embattled Democrat of snubbing them and vowed to protest at tomorrow’s state convention even as she scrambled to placate supporters.

“If she really wanted to reach out to our native people and have a discussion about issues that are affecting us, then she needs to talk to our tribal media,” said Rhonda Levando Gayton, president of the Native American Journalists Association.

Rob Capriccioso, a reporter with Indian Country Today, said he has reached out to Warren’s campaign several times for an interview since May 15 and has been blown off. Capriccioso said there is a growing skepticism in Native American circles about Warren. …

Corner post on cool bumper stickers.

Other readers have kept the hits coming. One says, “Last week, while driving around Houston, I saw an F-350 with a sticker that said, ‘I’m not racist — I don’t like Biden either.’”

Another reader says, “Here in Wisconsin, we see the following on bumper stickers and yard signs: ‘Recall Santa: I didn’t get what I wanted.’”

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Chris Cillizza could have picked the president for having the Worst Week in Washington, but instead he picked Elizabeth Warren for the second time in a month. So Maureen Dowd did her own version of WWW and she picked the kid prez.

ON Friday night, the nation’s capital was under a tornado watch. And that was the best thing that happened to the White House all week.

As the president was being slapped by Mitt Romney for being too weak on national security, he was being rapped by a Times editorial for being too aggressive on national security.

A Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane revealed that the liberal law professor who campaigned against torture and the Iraq war now personally makes the final decisions on the “kill list,” targets for drone strikes. “A unilateral campaign of death is untenable,” the editorial asserted.

On Thursday, Bill Clinton once more telegraphed that he considers Obama a lightweight who should not have bested his wife. Bluntly contradicting the Obama campaign theme that Romney is a heartless corporate raider, Clinton told CNN that the Republican’s record at Bain was “sterling.”

Covering a humorous W. at the unveiling of his portrait, the White House press actually seemed nostalgic for the president who bollixed up Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina and the economy — a sure sign that the Obama magic is flagging.

On Friday, an ugly job market report led to the stock market’s worst day of the year. As the recovery flat-lined, the president conceded to a crowd at a Honeywell factory in Golden Valley, Minn., that “our economy is still facing some serious headwinds” and getting sucked further into Europe’s sinkhole. In depressing imagery for the start of the summer campaign, cable channels carried the red Dow arrow pointing down while Obama spoke; the Dow wiped out all of its 2012 gains.

The president who started off with such dazzle now seems incapable of stimulating either the economy or the voters. His campaign is offering Obama 2012 car magnets for a donation of $10; cat collars reading “I Meow for Michelle” for $12; an Obama grill spatula for $40, and discounted hoodies and T-shirts. How the mighty have fallen. …

Charles Krauthammer on Obama the “drone warrior.”

… So the peacemaker, Nobel laureate, nuclear disarmer, apologizer to the world for America having lost its moral way when it harshly interrogated the very people Obama now kills, has become — just in time for the 2012 campaign — Zeus the Avenger, smiting by lightning strike.

A rather strange ethics. You go around the world preening about how America has turned a new moral page by electing a president profoundly offended by George W. Bush’s belligerence and prisoner maltreatment, and now you’re ostentatiously telling the world that you personally play judge, jury and executioner to unseen combatants of your choosing and whatever innocents happen to be in their company.

This is not to argue against drone attacks. In principle, they are fully justified. No quarter need be given to terrorists who wear civilian clothes, hide among civilians and target civilians indiscriminately. But it is to question the moral amnesia of those whose delicate sensibilities were offended by the Bush methods that kept America safe for a decade — and who now embrace Obama’s campaign of assassination by remote control.

Moreover, there is an acute military problem. Dead terrorists can’t talk.

Drone attacks are cheap — which is good. But the path of least resistance has a cost. It yields no intelligence about terror networks or terror plans.

One capture could potentially make us safer than 10 killings. …

According to Matthew Continetti, picking drone targets has prevented the president from answering Assad’s atrocities in Syria.

Elie Wiesel had a question for Barack Obama. The author, a survivor of Auschwitz, was accompanying the president on a tour of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on April 23. As they passed through an exhibit detailing the U.S. government’s denial of refuge to Jews fleeing the Nazi empire, Wiesel asked Obama, “What would you do?” Afterward, in public remarks, Obama did not mention his answer. But he did say, when confronted by atrocities, “You don’t just count on officials, you don’t just count on governments. You count on people—and mobilizing their consciences.”

After the barbaric events of last week in the Syrian village of Houla, where government troops massacred more than a hundred women and children, Obama’s words sound hollow. And the initiative he announced that day seems like a slap in the face.

Obama used his visit to the Holocaust Museum to remind the world that on August 4, 2011, he issued a “Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities” that ordered the creation of “an interagency Atrocities Prevention Board” to “coordinate a whole of government approach to preventing mass atrocities and genocide.” The first task of this board would be a thorough “interagency review” to “develop and recommend the membership, mandate, structure, operational protocols, authorities, and support necessary for the Atrocities Prevention Board to coordinate and develop atrocity prevention and response policy.” The National Security Council’s staff director for War Crimes and Atrocities, a human rights attorney who once served as George Clooney’s “full time human-rights adviser,” would supervise the review.

Forget health care rationing. This toothless parody of bureaucracy is the real “death panel”—a collection of titleholders that stands by in the face of mass murder. Its job is to “help the U.S government identify and address atrocity threats,” in the midst of one of the worst “atrocity threats” in recent memory. When asked Wednesday if the Atrocities Prevention Board has even met to discuss Syria, White House press secretary Jay Carney could only say, “I don’t know the answer to that.” Maybe the board is still busy conducting its interagency review.

This isn’t a joke. It is an insult to Assad’s victims. …

WSJ Editors write on Eric Holder’s latest outrage. 

The United States of America has a black President whose chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General Eric Holder, is also black. They have a lot of political power. So how are they using it? Well, one way is to assert to black audiences that voter ID laws are really attempts to disenfranchise black Americans. And liberals think Donald Trump’s birther fantasies are offensive?

“In my travels across this country, I’ve heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from citizens, who—often for the first time in their lives—now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation’s most noble ideals,” Mr. Holder said Wednesday in a speech to the Council of Black Churches. Voter ID laws and white discrimination, he added, mean that “some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang in the balance.”

That’s right. The two most powerful men in America are black, two of the last three Secretaries of State were black, numerous corporate CEOs and other executives are black, and minorities of many races now win state-wide elections in states that belonged to the Confederacy, but the AG implies that Jim Crow is on the cusp of a comeback.

It’s demeaning to have to dignify this argument with facts, but here goes. …

Similar thoughts from Thomas Sowell.

Attorney General Eric Holder recently told a group of black clergymen that the right to vote was being threatened by people who are seeking to block access to the ballot box by blacks and other minorities.

This is truly world-class chutzpah, by an Attorney General who stopped attorneys in his own Department of Justice from completing the prosecution of black thugs who stationed themselves outside a Philadelphia voting site to harass and intimidate white voters.

This may have seemed like a small episode to some at the time, but it was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The U.S. Attorney who was prosecuting that case — J. Christian Adams — resigned from the Department of Justice in protest, and wrote a book about a whole array of similar race-based decisions on voting rights by Eric Holder and his subordinates at the Department of Justice.

The book is titled “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” It names names, dates and places around the country where the Department of Justice stopped its own attorneys from pursuing cases of voter fraud and intimidation, when it was blacks who were accused of these crimes.

If Mr. Adams is lying, he has taken a huge risk in citing individuals by name and quoting them directly. Yet, despite the fact that most of those he accuses are lawyers, apparently no one has sued him. Moreover, Adams has also testified under oath before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, on the racial double standard at the Department of Justice, when it comes to voting rights. …

More kudos for the Romney campaign. This time from a Michael Walsh Corner post.

More impressive action from the rebels of the Mitt Romney camp as they opened up a three-front skirmish against forces loyal to the Emperor Hussein yesterday in Boston, Fremont, Calif., and Washington, D.C. 

There was the candidate himself, giving a sharp speech about the crony-capitalistic disaster of Solyndra outside the shuttered headquarters of the green pipe dream itself. At the same time, President Obama was pinned down in the capital, grinding his teeth through some typically solipsistic remarks while his detested predecessor grabbed the spotlight at the unveiling of his official presidential portrait — and  wowed the crowd with some folksy self-deprecation and love for his family.

But the most important engagement of the day was the public heckling of presidential consigliere David Axelrod, including orchestrated chants of “Solyndra, Solyndra.” Never elected to anything, the former Chicago Tribune reporter and city-hall bureau-chief-turned-campaign-consultant made an unforced error in emerging from the shadows, where the general public could get a good look at him. …

Ed Morrissey reports on the diminished fortunes of Wisconsin’s unions.

Popquiz, hotshots*: You have public-employee unions that force public-sector employees to pay dues and make the state act as their bagman.  The state refuses to collect dues and changes the law to make dues and union membership entirely voluntary.  What do people do?

That’s easy … they quit paying the dues:

David Harsanyi on Bloomberg’s Big Soda Ban.

This week, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced that he will outlaw the sale of sodas, sports drinks and other sugary beverages that exceed 16 ounces. Don’t worry. There are numerous exemptions to this petty interference. Feel free to indulge in high-caloric milkshakes, fruit juices or just head to the convenience store and grab a Big Gulp, a Slurpee, or buy large bottles of Diet Coke.

When you act like a petty tyrant, making arbitrary decisions with absolutely no basis in science or common sense is your prerogative. In the Bloomberg’s vernacular this is referred to as “leadership.” “I think that’s what the public wants the mayor to do,” he explained. The public’s loathing for large-sized soda is so high, evidently, that they need a billionaire technocrat to force them to stop buying more of it.

This is nothing new in New York. Bloomberg, who embodies C.S. Lewis’ observation that “those who torment us for our own good torment us without end,” has banned smoking in bars and restaurants, public parks and on private terraces. He has gone after salt and he has banned trans fats in restaurants. …

The cartoonists have fun with NY’s soda ban.

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John Hinderaker celebrates the Romney campaign competence.

One of the most heartening aspects of the early stages of the presidential race has been the Romney campaign’s aggressiveness. Nothing discourages activists more than getting out front of a candidate who, it later turns out, isn’t willing to do what it takes to win. A number of Republicans of recent years could be said to fit that description, most recently John McCain. But not Mitt Romney.

We’ve seen it over and over: the Obama campaign will launch an attack, and in next to no time, the Romney team hits back–twice as hard, as President Obama and Glenn Reynolds both like to say. It happened with the smear of Ann Romney, it happened with the dog on the roof, it happened with the silly “war on women,” it happened with the administration’s clumsy attack on Bain Capital, and it happened again today with the Democrats’ attempt to denigrate Romney’s service as Governor of Massachusetts.

A campaign can resemble a boxing match. Obama thinks he sees an opening and takes a swing at Romney. But before he can do any damage, he realizes he has walked into a counterpunch. Bam! Romney rocks him, and Obama retreats in disarray. Romney has shown himself already to be a top-notch counterpuncher.

His campaign has shown itself to be tough in other ways, too. …

Bill Kristol has examples of how liberal Jews have turned away from the president.

There are no wounds as bad as those inflicted by one who loves you: their hurt is accurate. Their pain burns. In the midst of the election campaign in the US, a comprehensive book on the achievements and failures of the administration’?s foreign policy was published this month (Bending History: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy). The Middle Eastern chapters were written by Martin Indyk, who served twice as US ambassador to Israel and was one of the senior members of the peace process team. Four years ago, he supported Hillary Clinton. After she lost the Democratic Party’?s primary elections, he enlisted in Obama’?s election campaign. He praised him highly before audiences of Jewish Americans and Israelis.

?Not this time. The chapter he wrote presents a long series of colossal mistakes by the US president, partly due to inexperience, mostly due to misunderstanding of the Israeli-Arab arena, unsuitable temperament and erroneous conceptions. Obama did not show any particular interest in regime change and democracy in the Arab world. Ironically, it’?s the only area which has changed during his term in office….

… ?There is no argument that regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict, Obama’?s first term of office has been a complete failure, I said. He promised to bring peace, but couldn’?t renew the negotiations that took place on a regular basis during the Bush era. The Arab world didn’?t believe him. The Israelis didn’?t trust him……

?The turning point was Obama’?s speech at Cairo University in June 2009. I was there. After the speech, I spoke to Obama’?s close advisers, Ram Emanuel and David Axelrod. I told them that the Israelis took the speech badly. The comparison between the Holocaust and Palestinian suffering infuriated them. The fact that Obama chose to speak in Cairo but not visit Jerusalem hurt their honor.

?The two looked at each other in silence, as if to say, we knew it would happen, we warned him but he refused to listen. As time passed, the fact that Obama wrote the speech himself, against the advice of all his advisers, was made public.

John Podhoretz reacts to the typically immodest Obama claim he knows more about Judiasm than any other president.  

… Perhaps what the president meant is that he’s known more Jews than other presidents. This too is an absurdity, as Ronald Reagan spent 30 years in Hollywood and had Jews coming out his ears. In fact, chances are Barack Obama knows less about Judaism than most presidents, except that he knows a lot of liberal Jews.

What the president does, without question, know a great deal about is the act of preening.

Alana Goodman posts on Obama’s Jewish friends in Chicago.

John has already responded to President Obama’s absurd claim about being a Judaism genius. But that may not even be the most offensive argument Obama made at yesterday’s meeting with Conservative Jewish rabbis, according to the Haaretz report. When asked about his personal views on Israel — the kishkes question again — Obama reportedly went for the some-of-my-best-friends-are-Jews defense:

There were some questions directed at the president concerning his thoughts on the role of religious leaders in a more civil political dialogue, which then lead to the inevitable question – how does he feels about Israel? Obama joked that [Chief of Staff Jack] Lew always warns him it will get to “the kishkes question.”

“Rather than describe how deeply I care about Israel, I want to be blunt about how we got here,” Obama said, reminding his guests that he had so many Jewish friends in Chicago at the beginning of his political career that he was accused of  being a puppet of the Israel lobby.

Ignore the overwhelming ignorance and offensiveness of that argument for a second. The one person I can recall who has actually accused Obama of being an AIPAC puppet is Rev. Wright — though his theory was that Obama didn’t turn into a lapdog for the Jews until he started running for president. I don’t doubt the president hung out with plenty of Jews in Chicago, but considering that some of the most vile Israel bashers out there are Jewish, that says absolutely nothing about his own views on Israel. Plus, if we’re now supposed to judge Obama’s support for Israel based on his Chicago friendships, that’s not exactly comforting. Two of his close friends in the city were an anti-Semitic pastor and a famed anti-Israel academic — oh, and there was also his domestic terrorist buddy who participates in anti-Israel activism on the side. What are we supposed to glean from that?

These friendships were one of the reasons why the pro-Israel community was initially unsure about Obama’s true personal feelings on Israel during his 2008 campaign. Since then, those early concerns have been substantiated again and again by Obama’s own public actions and statements on Israel. The American public still supports the Jewish state, which means Obama grudgingly supports it when necessary, but it’s clear his heart isn’t there. His lame response when questioned on his true feelings — citing knowledge of Judaism and friendship with Jews — is just the latest example of that disconnect.

Speaking of Chicago, John Fund says it is time to look at some of the friends from there.

… John Heilemann, co-author of a definitive work on the 29008 election called Game Change, writes in a new piece in New York magazine that for “anyone still starry-eyed about Obama” the 2012 campaign will disabuse them of that notion:

The months ahead will provide a bracing revelation about what he truly is: not a savior, not a saint, not a man above the fray, but a brass-knuckled, pipe-hitting, red-in-tooth-and-claw brawler determined to do what is necessary to stay in power — in other words, a politician.

If the mainstream-media journalists who spent so little time in 2008 looking into the Daley machine that Barack Obama sprang from want to do more due diligence this time, they could start with a closer look at Eric Whitaker and the rest of Obama’s inner circle. It’s probably a much richer mine of stories than any investigation of Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital days or Ann Romney’s obsession with expensive horses is likely to provide. 

Andrew Malcolm has the story on another Dem who has bailed on Obama.

Good thing Artur Davis doesn’t live in Chicago. He’d be worse than friendless this morning.

The former member of Congress, the first from outside Illinois who endorsed then Sen. Barack Obama for the presidency so long ago, is now a former Democrat too.

Davis, who represented Alabama’s 7th congressional district for four terms until last year, says he’s left his longtime party, left Alabama for Virginia and is pondering a state or congressional race there, as a Republican.

It’s a wounding PR blow to Obama’s reelection campaign, which has had some rocky weeks recently, even with Joe Biden on vacation now. Davis’ defection is also an unexpected and rare fracture in the seemingly monolithic political support for Obama among blacks. …

Michael Barone writes on the Dem campaign managers.

“Axelrod is endeavoring not to panic.” So reads a sentence in John Heilemann‘s exhaustive article on Barack Obama’s campaign in this week’s New York magazine.

Heilemann is a fine reporter and was co-author with Time’s Mark Halperin of a best-selling book on the 2008 presidential campaign. While his sympathies are undoubtedly with Obama, he does a fine job of summarizing the arguments and tactics of both sides.

And he’s capable of directing snark at both candidates. Samples: Romney “seems to suffer a hybrid of affluenza and Tourette’s.” “A cynic might say that the liberation Obama feels is the freedom from, you know, actually governing.”

Heilemann’s article is well-sourced. It’s based on interviews with David Axelrod, the former White House aide now back in Chicago, David Plouffe, the 2008 manager now in the White House, and Jim Messina, the current campaign manager.

The picture Heilemann draws is of campaign managers whose assumptions have been proved wrong and who seem to be fooling themselves about what will work in the campaign. …

Debra Saunders has a devastating take on E. Warren.

It’s hard to figure who looks the worse in this story – Elizabeth Warren or Harvard Law School’s affirmative action policies. …

… Warren’s campaign now is working overtime to pooh-pooh any notion that she was hired for any reason other than that she was a great law professor. I believe that.

I also believe that Warren was too smart to not know that she was 31 times more white than Native American. She’s too smart to not know that the designation could help her career, while taking pressure off Harvard Law to hire a real minority. But she was not so liberal that she cared.

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Holman Jenkins writes about the Bain ads.

… Mr. Obama’s great political talent has been his knack for granting his admirers permission to think highly of themselves for thinking highly of him. The self-approval of his supporters is the engine of his political rise, albeit married to the kind of hardball that drove his two most formidable rivals out of the 2004 Senate race in divorce-related scandals.

But now there’s a problem. In a presidential re-election race, the formula is inconvenienced by the existence of a very public record of things done and said, of persistent joblessness and sluggish growth, and one big issue that threatens to dwarf the Obama allure altogether—the entire industrial world’s rendezvous with insolvency.

Here’s the real message of the Bain ads. The ads may invoke classic private-equity slurs like looter and stripper, but the real message is that private equity is exactly what it says it is: a bringer of efficiency and rationalization. Mr. Romney, the ads say, wants to take things away from you that he claims no longer are affordable; Mr. Obama, the ads say, will fight whoever tries to take things away. To the less sophisticated voter, the Obama message is a soothing “nothing has to change.” To the more sophisticated, President Obama proposes himself as the defender of every spending interest, never favoring a cut, always pushing for higher taxes.

Look at Europe. Look at California. This strategy can work electorally. As policy, it may be unbelievable, irrational and misleading—like Gov. Jerry Brown clinging to his bullet train. But it makes a kind of political sense. …

Andrew Malcolm lists three of Romney’s emerging strengths.

With summer officially underway and only 161 days left before the presidential election, it’s a good time to take inventory of Mitt Romney’s chances of sending Barack Obama into early retirement a la Jimmy Carter.

The MSM has made much of Obama’s commanding poll leads among blacks and Latinos. Romney was supposed to be vulnerable among evangelicals, until Obama’s same-sex wedding gift. We heard a lot about Obama’s strength among women, until it started to fade.

No one knows, of course, but conventional wisdom today holds the Nov. 6 outcome will be close. Unless it isn’t. And then we’ll hear all about why it wasn’t. 

You don’t hear much about Romney’s strengths these days, but what can we discern right now about them and their scope?

Well, economics and jobs have been atop virtually every opinion poll since Obama took office and began his determined drive for pretty much anything else. Gallup asked people recently to describe their economic views. By more than a two-to-one margin (46%-20%) Americans called themselves some shade of conservative instead of liberal. Even moderates (32%) outnumbered liberals.

On social issues the gap was closer (38%-28%), but conservatives still outweighed the spendthrifts.

Advantage: Romney …

Jennifer Rubin thinks Romney’s electoral college prospects are good.

Not too long ago pundits were arguing that Mitt Romney’s path to 270 electoral votes was “narrow.” We didn’t buy it.

Lo and behold, conventional wisdom has now changed. The Associated Press writes: “Warning signs for Obama on tight path to 270.” The AP explains:

“Obama’s new worries about North Carolina and Wisconsin offer opportunities for Republican Mitt Romney, who must peel off states Obama won in 2008 if he’s to cobble together the 270 electoral votes needed to oust the incumbent in November.

Iowa, which kicked off the campaign in January, is now expected to be tight to the finish, while New Mexico, thought early to be pivotal, seems to be drifting into Democratic territory.

If the election were today, Obama would likely win 247 electoral votes to Romney’s 206, according to an Associated Press analysis of polls, ad spending and key developments in states, along with interviews with more than a dozen Republican and Democratic strategists both inside and outside of the two campaigns.

Seven states, offering a combined 85 electoral votes, are viewed as too close to give either candidate a meaningful advantage: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia.”

Among that group, you have to like Romney’s chance in Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia, with Iowa and Colorado going to the President Obama. That puts Romney’s total at 276. …

Alana Goodman thinks the president’s campaign will have a hard time scaring the folks with the “hard right Romney.”

John Heilemann has a big-picture report on the Obama campaign’s shift from hope to fear. Rather than focusing on an affirmative reelection message, Obama’s strategy is to paint Mitt Romney as a composite of various nightmarish right-wingers in the hope that it will scare off independent voters and shore up the progressive base:…

… Beyond Romney’s record, his personality doesn’t fit the stereotype of the extreme right-winger. He’s mild-mannered and accentless, and walks without swagger. He chooses his words carefully and rarely goes off message. The Obama campaign can compare him to fringe characters like Joe Arpaio all it wants, but the disparity is unmistakable….

Weekly Standard piece wonders if Scott Brown is going to get lucky again.

The event was called “Hoops for Our Troops,” and it was held on Armed Forces Day (May 19) in a high school gym here in Newton. The mayor, Setti Warren, came up with the idea. He is an Iraq war veteran himself and passionate about helping vets. The event brought veterans together with potential employers as well as representatives from job training programs, health care providers, counseling services, and others. Spice for the event came in the form of two basketball games. In one, the players were disabled veterans in wheelchairs. The other game, which was the draw, was between teams that were a mix of vets and local celebrities, mostly from broadcasting and sports, among them Kevin Faulk of the New England Patriots. Mayor Warren also suited up to play.

This was a made-to-order opportunity, then, for any capable, hustling politician looking to connect with constituents, early in a tough campaign. So Senator Scott Brown, who is an officer in the National Guard with some brief service in Afghanistan, arrived a little before halftime in the second game and worked the room. He goofed a little with the players. Shook a lot of hands. Did not make a speech and, in general, kept things low-key and casual. He was either enjoying himself and happy to be there, or very gifted at pretending to be. Which, in his line of work, probably amounts to the same thing.

It is fortunate for Brown that he is good at this sort of thing because if he intends to win in the league where he has chosen to compete, then he is going to have to play large. He is, first of all, a Republican, and no matter how hard you try, you can only go so far in ameliorating that liability in Massachusetts, which is among the bluest of the blue states. So blue, in fact, that Mitt Romney, who once managed to get himself elected governor of Massachusetts, is certain to concede the state as a lock for President Obama.

The Senate seat which Scott Brown now occupies was held for 46 years by Ted Kennedy. It is still considered by many to be “the Kennedy seat,” though Brown got some traction in the 2010 special election to fill the two years remaining in Kennedy’s term after his death by insisting that it is “the people’s seat.” Nice point, but then most of “the people” are Democrats.

Brown was expected to lose that election, and he might have, except that it was the time of the Tea Party ascendant, and opposition to Obamacare was running high. Voters knew that Brown might represent the needed 40th vote to keep a filibuster alive in the Senate.

He also had the good fortune to run against a political stiff  …

Throughout the Fauxcahontas flap, the Boston Globe has been supporting her version of events – until now. Corner post by Patrick Brennan has the story.

Over the weekend, more news emerged about the bizarre controversy over how Elizabeth Warren and Harvard University identified the law professor’s ethnicity. Warren has claimed that she did not identify herself as a minority, and didn’t know that Harvard had, but Harvard registered her as a Native American in a federal database that’s usually based on self-identification (indeed, one wonders how else someone would label Warren a Native American, save her claim). The Boston Globe reports: …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor.

Fallon: A recent survey found that more men are finding work in fields that are historically dominated by women. Yeah, I heard it from that nun at my church — Sister Gary.

Fallon: Michelle Obama says if she could trade places with anyone in the world, it would be Beyoncé. Of course, it got awkward when Barack was like, “I’m game!”

Fallon: A solar-powered plane tried to fly over 1,500 miles. Going great until the plane encountered this one technical problem — night.

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Peter Wehner makes a point about the administration’s claim Romney has no idea how to be president.

… For Obama and Biden to lecture Romney on the qualifications for being president is like John Edwards and Bill Clinton lecturing us on the importance of fidelity in marriage. Their case is undermined by their record, their actions, and their failures.

I cannot imagine a greater in-kind gift to the Romney campaign than for the president and the vice president to run on their stewardship. But that is what they’ve decided to do, at least this week.

Andrew Malcolm says Wisconsin is very important.

… June 5 is the election in Wisconsin, the unions’ attempt to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker using Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, you say. That’s a re-run of the 2010 election. And you’re right. It is. And the same result is likely, according to late polls.

But this time much more is at stake. This time Wisconsin’s election has become a symbol of the national struggle between Republicans and Democrats, between fiscal restraint and spending as usual, between President Obama’s vision of uncontrolled spending to transform America into something else and the opposite.

The stakes are huge. Because either way the winning side will interpret Cheeseland’s verdict as emblematic of the national mood, with a national election coming just 154 days later.

Obama didn’t deliver what he promised the unions during this term. So, his operatives at the Democratic National Committee are quietly sending in money and help to oust Walker, a fiscal hawk whose budget cuts, collective bargaining reforms and radical ideas such as teachers paying some of their pension are already benefiting local governments and school boards.

But Obama doesn’t want a high profile there in case the Dems lose there again. The Real Good Talker is already suffering from E.D., Election Dysfunction as a significant number of voters have opted for nobodies or “Uncommitted” against him in Democratic primaries, even though he’s essentially unchallenged. …

The analogies with the Civil War are overdone, but Bill Kristol’s piece on significance of Wisconsin and the GOP’s deep bench is good to read.

… Campaigns tend to focus on making the case for their uniquely qualified candidate. But the case for Romney as president is immeasurably strengthened if it’s not just about Mitt Romney. His case is reinforced by the successes of governors like Mitch Daniels and Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell and Scott Walker and Susana Martinez. These governors have had real successes dealing with the fiscal and financial challenges their states have faced. And this during the same period in which President Obama (and to some degree President Bush before him) failed to grapple with comparable problems at the national level—and at the same time that Democratic governors and legislators in states like Illinois and California have conspicuously failed.

If Team Romney can become Team Romney-Walker-Daniels-Christie-et al., Romney’s campaign will take on a sharper focus. His chances of prevailing this fall will increase. It’s true that he might win anyway in a long and difficult slog. But a Walker victory in Wisconsin on the first Tuesday in June could provide a defining moment for the Romney campaign—and for the forces of responsible Republican reform against reactionary Democratic opposition.

It’s up to the Romney campaign to seize that moment and spend the months after June 5 explaining that a Republican president is needed to complete at the national level the “work so gloriously prosecuted so far” by Republican governors.

Michael Barone says life in the liberal cocoon dulls the senses.

… cocooning has an asymmetrical effect on liberals and conservatives. Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama administration.

They’re made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own responses.

Liberals can protect themselves better against assaults from outside their cocoon. They can stay out of megachurches and make sure their remote controls never click on Fox News. They can stay off the AM radio dial so they will never hear Rush Limbaugh.

The problem is that this leaves them unprepared to make the best case for their side in public debate. They are too often not aware of holes in arguments that sound plausible when bandied between confreres entirely disposed to agree.

We have seen how this works on some issues this year.

Take the arguments developed by professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown Law that Obamacare’s mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional. Some liberal scholars like Jack Balkin of Yale have addressed them with counterarguments of their own.

But liberal politicians and Eric Holder’s Justice Department remained clueless about them. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked whether Obamacare was unconstitutional, could only gasp, “Are you serious? Are you serious?” …

A good example of leftist cocooning is the disparate reactions to a couple of hit pieces posing as books. Byron York tells about the fawning treatment made over a hatchet job on Bush and compares that to the left liberal press practically ignoring a new book on Obama. Here’s how the NY Times got the word of the Bush book out on the sly.

… The New York Times also found a way to pass on the accusation without passing on the accusation; the paper published several articles about the controversy over the book, even if it did not directly quote the book itself. Times readers certainly got the idea.

The party ended when the Dallas Morning News reported Hatfield was “a felon on parole, convicted in Dallas of hiring a hit man for a failed attempt to kill his employer with a car bomb in 1987.” The publisher of “Fortunate Son,” St. Martin’s Press, quickly withdrew the book.

But nobody could withdraw the story. For a while, the tale that Bush had been arrested for cocaine possession, even though it was told by an unknown author who was also a felon who apparently made the whole thing up — that tale was the talk of the 2000 presidential race. (Hatfield committed suicide in 2001.)

Fast-forward to today. Klein’s book reports that in the spring of 2008, in the middle of the presidential campaign and in the heat of the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary sermons, a very close friend of Barack Obama’s offered Wright a payoff if Wright would remain silent until after the November election.

The source of the story is Jeremiah Wright himself. Wright told it, in his own words, in a nearly three-hour recorded interview with Klein. (The author gave the audio of the entire interview to me, as well as to other reporters who asked.)

Unlike the media storm over “Fortunate Son,” the Wright revelation has attracted very little comment in the press. The Associated Press and most of those outlets that talked about Bush and cocaine? They’ve had little or nothing to say about Jeremiah Wright and alleged payoffs. …

Robert Samuelson says it’s time to stop pretending that everyone should have a college education.

The college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness. Time to ditch it. Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, it’s now doing more harm than good. It looms as the largest mistake in educational policy since World War II, even though higher education’s expansion also ranks as one of America’s great postwar triumphs.

Consider. In 1940, fewer than 5 percent of Americans had a college degree. Going to college was “a privilege reserved for the brightest or the most affluent” high-school graduates, wrote Diane Ravitch in her history of U.S. education, “The Troubled Crusade.” No more. At last count, roughly 40 percent of Americans had some sort of college degree: about 30 percent a bachelor’s degree from a four-year institution; the rest associate degrees from community colleges.

Starting with the GI Bill in 1944, governments at all levels promoted college. From 1947 to 1980, enrollments jumped from 2.3 million to 12.1 million. In the 1940s, private colleges and universities accounted for about half. By the 1980s, state schools — offering heavily subsidized tuitions — represented nearly four-fifths. Aside from a democratic impulse, the surge reflected “the shift in the occupational structure to professional, technical, clerical and managerial work,” noted Ravitch. The economy demanded higher skills; college led to better-paying jobs.

College became the ticket to the middle class, the be-all-and-end-all of K-12 education. If you didn’t go to college, you’d failed. Improving “access” — having more students go to college — drove public policy.

We overdid it. The obsessive faith in college has backfired.

For starters, we’ve dumbed down college. …

Mark Perry has the proof college has been dumbed down.

In 1960, the average undergraduate grade awarded in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota was 2.27 on a four-point scale.  In other words, the average letter grade at the University of Minnesota in the early 1960s was about a C+, and that was consistent with average grades at other colleges and universities in that era.  In fact, that average grade of C+ (2.30-2.35 on a 4-point scale) had been pretty stable at America’s colleges going all the way back to the 1920s (see chart above from GradeInflation.com, a website maintained by Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke University professor who has tirelessly crusaded for several decades against “grade inflation” at U.S. universities).

By 2006, the average GPA at public universities in the U.S. had risen to 3.01 and at private universities to 3.30.  That means that the average GPA at public universities in 2006 was equivalent to a letter grade of B, and at private universities a B+, and it’s likely that grades and GPAs have continued to inflate over the last six years. …

Which brings to mind a two year old post from the blog The View From Alexandria. The post is about Reynold’s Law. The bien pensants who run our governments have ruined home ownership and college education.

… The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them. …

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Marc Thiessen says forget about Bain, the real scandal is Obama’s public equity investments.

… Amazingly, Obama has declared that all the projects received funding “based solely on their merits.” But as Hoover Institution scholar Peter Schweizer reported in his book, “Throw Them All Out,” fully 71 percent of the Obama Energy Department’s grants and loans went to “individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party.” Collectively, these Obama cronies raised $457,834 for his campaign, and they were in turn approved for grants or loans of nearly $11.35 billion. Obama said this week it’s not the president’s job “to make a lot of money for investors.” Well, he sure seems to have made a lot of (taxpayer) money for investors in his political machine.

All that cronyism and corruption is catching up with the administration. According to Politico, “The Energy Department’s inspector general has launched more than 100 criminal investigations” related to the department’s green-energy programs.

Now the man who made Solyndra a household name says Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital “is what this campaign is going to be about.” Good luck with that, Mr. President. If Obama wants to attack Romney’s alleged private equity failures as chief executive of Bain, he’d better be ready to defend his own massive public equity failures as chief executive of the United States.

Politico reports on Obama’s shaky start.

Noting inspires Democrats like the Barack Obama swagger — the supreme self-confidence on stage, the self-certainty in private.

So nothing inspires more angst than when that same Obama stumbles, as he has leaving the gate in 2012.

That’s the unmistakable reality for Democrats since Obama officially launched his reelection campaign three weeks ago. Obama, not Mitt Romney, is the one with the muddled message — and the one who often comes across as baldly political. Obama, not Romney, is the one facing blowback from his own party on the central issue of the campaign so far — Romney’s history with Bain Capital. And most remarkably, Obama, not Romney, is the one falling behind in fundraising.

To top it off, Vice President Joe Biden has looked more like a distraction this month than the potent working-class weapon Obama needs him to be. …

… Romney has surprised his many critics with a clear and consistent focus on the economy, hands down the issue of the race. After months of missteps, the guy looks steady and disciplined again, much like he did in the early days of the GOP primaries. By playing to his strength, he has masked his weaknesses — for now.

By contrast, Obama has looked unsteady. Some Democrats have watched with dismay as the focus of Obama’s public comments bounced from student loans, to tax cuts for the rich, to trade, to Bain Capital.

Bain has turned into pain this week. For the first time, some top Democrats are questioning the strategy coming out of the reelection campaign’s Chicago headquarters, with some agreeing with Newark Mayor Cory Booker that Obama is making it too easy to paint him as anti-business. Ed Rendell and Steve Rattner also have publicly voiced concerns, echoed by many others in private conversations. The result has been a minor but very public split in the party on an issue Obama’s camp hoped would tag Romney with a series of crippling labels: elitist, mean-spirited, anti-worker. …

… Some key Democrats say they have been dismayed watching Obama become a divider not a uniter, trying to incite anger among women, students and older voters. It’s striking how, in private conversations with Obama advisers, they openly talk of chucking the feel-good politics of 2008 for a very conventional form of political warfare this time around. A low-grade friction has emerged among advisers on whether the hack approach is damaging the brand. …

John Steele Gordon suggests if Obamaphobes think the president is a dim bulb, they’re making a mistake.

Daily Caller posts on David Brooks’ dislike of Obama Bain Strategy.

Brooks called one ad, which blamed Romney for a steel plant closing, little more than “a whole series of falsehoods.”

“And, finally, I just think the Obama administration, or the campaign has demeaned itself with a series of falsehoods. They released this ad which had a whole series of falsehoods. The one was that this steel company, GST, was a healthy company until Bain took it over, which the ad suggests — completely untrue.”

Brooks added that some of these attacks blamed Romney for Bain’s activities long after the former Massachusetts governor had left the company.

“Second, [the idea] that Romney was part of throwing people out on the street when they finally did have to close this failing company,” he continued. “He was long gone from Bain. And then, finally, that these private equity companies load debt onto businesses. There is a study, though, reported in my newspaper. There is no more debt, no more default in these companies than in other comparable companies. So, it’s this whole series of things which were untrue, which make Obama seem much more like a conventional politician.”

Howard Kurtz reports on a biography of Walter Cronkite.

In the early 1970s, the most trusted man in America did a very untrustworthy thing.

Unbeknownst to the millions who tuned in religiously to the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite cut a deal with Pan Am to fly his family to vacation spots around the world. Together with a handful of friends, they roamed from the South Pacific to Haiti, with Cronkite snorkeling, swimming, and drinking, thanks to a friend at the airline. According to Douglas Brinkley’s sweeping and masterful biography Cronkite, the news division president, Dick Salant, was upset at what he deemed a blatant conflict of interest, but took no action against his star anchor.

This was not the Cronkite I grew up admiring from the time I watched his image flickering on a small black-and-white set, the voice of authority in an age when we still revered, without a trace of cynicism, those who spoon-fed us the news.

I got to know Cronkite after his anchoring days as a charming, hard-of-hearing, slightly stodgy spokesman for old-fashioned news values against the encroachment of tabloid entertainment. There was a certain sadness about him, an old warrior who sorely missed being in the trenches. He was a creature of a simpler time, telling me in 2002 that the network newscasts should be all headlines and no features, seemingly ignoring the rhythms of the Internet age.

In reading this first major biography of Cronkite, I came to realize that the man who once dominated television journalism was more complicated—and occasionally more unethical—than the legend that surrounds him. Had Cronkite engaged in some of the same questionable conduct today—he secretly bugged a committee room at the 1952 GOP convention—he would have been bashed by the blogs, pilloried by the pundits, and quite possibly ousted by his employer. That he endured and prospered, essentially unscathed, until his death in 2009 reminded me of how impervious the monopoly media were in those days, largely shielded from the scrutiny they inflicted on everyone else.

“Nobody wanted to go after Walter Cronkite,” Brinkley says. Within CBS “he became a force of nature. He could almost dictate anything he wanted. He was the franchise.”

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Andrew Ferguson explains the great danger if the GOP wins it all in November.

… Last week a majority of congressional Republicans joined with Democrats to renew for three years the charter of the Export-Import Bank, a New Deal relic that in theory helps American exporters by, among other things, offering loans to foreign traders to buy American products. Although the Ex-Im Bank is a quasi-private institution, its loans are guaranteed by the taxpayers, making it a prime instrument of industrial policy, or corporate statism, or state capitalism (choose your epithet). By favoring one company over another and choosing to subsidize one industry and not another—the faddish renewable energy field is a particular favorite at the moment—the bank lets the government, specifically the Congress, pick winners and losers in the marketplace. It mixes politics and capital in ways that Republicans customarily claim to abhor.

But not this time. The bank is a favorite not only of Democrats, who after all have no principled claim against industrial policy, but also of the big business lobby. The National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce strongly backed the renewal, proving again that they are less interested in free markets than in profit-making—and whether their members make money through government subsidy or market competition is of secondary importance to them. (Recall the chamber’s energetic support of the Obama stimulus.) On the other side were a few right-wing pea shooters like Heritage Action and the Club for Growth. Guess which side of the debate the press portrayed as the power-crazed bad guys.

As most of the news stories noted, the Ex-Im Bank is a totem of that fabled bipartisanship that certain kinds of partisans cherish. That’s one of the attractions of crony capitalism: It’s wonderfully bipartisan, so long as “we can spread the wealth around,” to coin a phrase, so that the most powerful interests stay happy enough to write campaign checks. It was especially disconcerting to see House majority leader Eric Cantor unite with his Democratic opposite number, Steny Hoyer, to forge a “compromise” that will keep the bank going another three years—and expand the portfolio of guaranteed loans from $100 billion to $140 billion. …

Peggy Noonan interviews Mitt.

It’s been a good week for Mitt Romney. The polls are up, he’s just off a two-day swing through Connecticut and New York, where he hauled in big donors and hard money, and he swept the GOP primaries in Kentucky and Arkansas. On Tuesday Texas will put him over the top and make him, formally and officially, the Republican nominee for president.

Not everything worked—his big education speech Wednesday was wan and pallid—but he’s having a moment. In a telephone interview, he reflected on the campaign, tracing his candidacy’s upward momentum to an increased sense among voters that the country is on the wrong path and, perhaps, a growing sense that he’s proved himself: “I can tell you that we went through those 37 or 38 contests and won the must-win states, and in some cases we started off 10 points behind. And we hustled, worked hard, and convinced the voters.” This produced “the kind of track record that people say, ‘You know, I think if Mitt can keep that up, in November we’re going to see a new president.’”

Candidates on a campaign van look out the window and see America go by. They meet with people, talk. I asked Mr. Romney the difference between the America he saw in 2008 and the one he sees now. “A much higher degree of anxiety today. People much less confident in the security of their job, less confident in the prospects for their children.” Four years ago, the economic downturn hadn’t occurred. “In my primary, the central issue was Iraq.” Now it is the economy.

Before rallies and town meetings, he always tries to have private, off-the-record meetings with voters. “I sit down with five or six couples or individuals and just go around the table, and I ask them to tell me about their life. And the stories I hear suggest a degree of anxiety which is not reflected in the statistics.” He is struck, he said, by the number of people who are employed but in legitimate fear of being let go. He is struck by the number of people who’ve made investments for their retirement—real estate, 401(k)s—and seen them go down. …

Matthew Continetti pans the performance of the Obama campaign.

We are rapidly approaching the moment at which Washington reevaluates the Obama campaign’s reputation for competence and expertise. Every week, one or several of Obama’s surrogates trip over their own words; every day, Jim Messina and David Plouffe and David Axelrod must scratch their heads in wonder at the mess they are creating. One gaffe is an isolated event. Two is an embarrassment. But three or more form a pattern, one that is damaging not only Obama’s precarious chances for reelection but also the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

The most recent trouble arrived last Sunday in the person of Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who went fantastically off message when he said his fellow Democrats’ attacks on Mitt Romney’s background in private equity are “nauseating.” The Obama for America hazardous waste disposal team leapt into action, forcing Booker to record a hostage-video-like recantation of his comments by the end of the day. It was too late, though. Booker had tested the waters of intra-Democrat dissent and had found they were warm. Dianne Feinstein, Chris Coons, Steve Rattner, Ed Rendell, Artur Davis, Harold Ford Jr., Mark Warner, and Joe Manchin all followed him in.

What Obama intended as an attack on the business practices of Bain Capital transmogrified into a debate over the fairness of that attack. The press hates hypocrites, and it did not take much digging to report that Obama raised more from private equity in the 2008 cycle than any other candidate, and that the president’s negative ad buy went up on the very day he held a $35,800 per plate fundraised in New York City with the president of private equity firm Blackstone.

Not even MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell could reconcile the war on Bain with the fact that Obama has taken more than $200,000 from the likes of Bain Capital managing Director Jonathan Lavine, not to mention tens of thousands from Landmark Partners Chairman Francisco Borges. The man would not even be president without the longstanding support of Chicago’s Pritzker family, which knows something about, in the words of Rep. James Clyburn (D., S.C.), “raping companies and leaving them in debt.”

The hypocrisy runs to the staffing decisions Obama makes. His White House is stuffed with Wall Street types. Two corporate buyout specialists sit on the president’s job council. All three of his chiefs of staff have worked for financial houses. His small business administrator worked in private equity. …

Jim Treacher in The Daily Caller spots the next Axelrod headache.

A new book on Barack Obama reveals fresh details about the president’s youthful days as an avid smoker of marijuana — a time when he and his fellow weed smokers called themselves the “Choom Gang.”

Among the highlights:

— Obama was known for his interceptions. This is the act of joining a circle of people passing around a joint, taking a hit and yelling, “Intercepted!”

— Obama and his friends at the Punahou School in Hawaii called themselves the “Choom Gang” — choom means smoking weed — and drove around in a Volkswagen bus called the “Choomwagon.”

— Obama and his crew enjoyed what they called “roof hits,” smoking pot inside a car with all the windows rolled up to maximize the amount of smoke they inhaled. …

Salena Zito reporting for the Tribune-Review on Biden’s trip to Ohio last week.

Dave Betras is known in “The Valley” for his colorful language and his political antics and drama. Last Wednesday, however, when Vice President Joe Biden visited a local industrial park, Betras was all about numbers.

“Oh, ‘The Valley’ is going to turn out big for Barack Obama this year, big!” he said, spreading his arms wide for emphasis. The chairman of Mahoning County’s Democrats pointed to local manufacturer M7 Technologies’ shipping warehouse filled with people waiting to hear Biden speak. “Turnout like today, a full room,” said Betras, 52.

If his job is to turn out Obama supporters on Election Day, he may want to check on their allegiances before he buses them to the polls. Many Youngstown attendees at Biden’s event do not support him or the president.

Bob McClain and his wife, Myra, came to M7 Technologies to support their friends’ family business. Neither supports the Obama-Biden ticket.

“We are friends of the owners — that is why we came, to show support for the Garvey family,” said Bob. At 71, he’s retired but volunteers full-time as a counselor for Mahoning Valley small-business owners.

“Our vote is going for who is best to lead on the economy. That is Romney, for us,” said Myra as her husband nodded.

Richard Furillo stood with his son Matthew at his son’s workplace; a lifelong Democrat, he voted for Obama in 2008 but won’t again. “I don’t know why I did it but I cannot stand any more ‘change,’” he said, referring to the president’s old campaign slogan.

Father and son both said they attended the event to support the company.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a sitting vice president,” added Matthew, also a Democrat. He, too, said he will vote for Romney. …

Streetwise Professor explains some of the Facebook shenanigans.

In the aftermath of its botched IPO, Facebook may need to change its name to Fiasco Book. The recriminations are flying fast and furious, and are likely to only intensify.

The basic facts are that right in the middle of the roadshow, Facebook realized that its earnings prospects were weaker than anticipated.  It released a revised S-1 disclosure that made a Delphic reference about the fact that its “daily active users” were growing faster than “ad impressions.”  It also told the underwriters that earnings would be at the low end of the range as a result of this poor performance.  Underwriters communicated this information to big institutional clients.  They issued no written report to the broader market, and Facebook did not make any disclosures beyond that Delphic statement.  Moreover, Facebook insiders decided to issue 25 percent more shares, and price the issue very successfully.

And the rest is history; the fingerpointing is the future.

The primary target of criticism has been Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter.  Leading the brigade of critics is Henry Blodget, of Business Insider.

Blodget initially suggested that Morgan Stanley might have broken the law by telling only some of its clients.  He has since walked that back completely, and now focuses on the unfairness of it all.  Moreover, Blodget gives Facebook executives, notably its CFO David Ebersman, a pass, and places the blame entirely on Morgan Stanley and the other underwriters. …

Visiting Boston, George Will weighs in on Fauxcahontas Warren.

… This controversy has discombobulated liberalism’s crusade to restore Democratic possession of the Senate seat the party won in 1952 with John Kennedy and held until 2010, when Brown captured it after Ted Kennedy’s death. Lofty thinkers and exasperated liberals consider the focus on Warren’s fanciful ancestry a distraction from serious stuff. (Such as The Post’s nearly 5,500-word wallow in teenage Mitt Romney’s prep school comportment?) But Warren’s adult dabbling in identity politics is pertinent because it is, in all its silliness, applied liberalism.

The New York Times Magazine’s headline on its profile of her — “Heaven Is a Place Called Elizabeth Warren” — suggests the chord she strikes with liberals. They resonate to identity politics of the sort Warren’s campaign tried when, on the defensive, it resorted, of course, to claiming victimhood. Playing the gender card, it insinuated that criticism of her adventures as a minority amounts to a sexist attack on an accomplished woman. But an accomplished woman, Susan Collins of Maine, the only Republican senator rated more liberal than Brown (who last year voted with his party only 54 percent of the time on partisan issues), called this insinuation “patently absurd.” … 

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Yuval Levin provides a thoughtful look at our age of anxiety and how presidential candidates might approach it.

There is something very strange about the 2012 presidential race so far. The election comes at a time of extraordinary public unease, which clearly demands some response from the political system, and especially from the men running for the highest office in the land. But the two presidential candidates are both running campaigns oddly detached from what is rightly worrying voters. 

If you were to judge the state of the country by listening only to the Obama campaign, you would conclude that we are on the verge of the long-awaited triumph of the liberal welfare state, and that all that stands in the way is a gang of retrograde Social Darwinists who somehow manage to be simultaneously nihilistic and theocratic. That band of reactionaries ran the economy into the ground for the sake of their wealthy patrons, and now they’re coming for our social programs and for women’s freedoms. Only if they are held off can the forward march of history proceed. 

If you were to judge the state of the country by listening only to the Romney campaign, you would conclude that all was well in America until we took a wrong turn four years ago and elected a president hostile to freedom and prosperity. If we just correct that error and undo what he has done, our economy will be ready to bloom again. 

But neither of these stories speaks to what actually seems to have voters uneasy. The persistently weak economy is at the core of that uneasiness: Thirty-five months after the recession technically ended, economic growth remains anemic, and unemployment remains very high. But Americans are nervous not only because the economy has yet to bounce back, but also because we have a sense that the economic order we knew in the second half of the 20th century may not be coming back at all—that we have entered a new era for which we have not been well prepared. 

To say that we are not, in fact, on the verge of the triumph of welfare-state liberalism is of course a gross understatement. We are, rather, on the cusp of the fiscal and institutional collapse of our welfare state, which threatens not only the future of government finances but also the future of American capitalism. But at the same time, American capitalism is not exactly ready to bloom once the shadow of Obama is lifted at last. While our welfare state has grown bloated and bankrupt, our economy has grown increasingly sclerotic—weighed down by a grossly inefficient public sector, the rise of crony capitalism, demographic changes transforming the workforce, and a general loss of focus on productivity and innovation. The American economy still has great stores of strength, but it is not well prepared to make the most of those strengths or to address its deficiencies as a global competitor. 

This is not the fault of conservative plutocrats or of Barack Obama. It is not the fault of income inequality or of the Federal Reserve. It is the fault of our country’s failure to adequately modernize its governing institutions and its economy—its public sector and its private sector. This failure exposes us to a grave risk of stagnation, and, therefore, decline. And it is that risk, which we all have been sensing in our bones in recent years, that has Americans exceptionally anxious. …

… The problem is that America is unprepared for the future, and Barack Obama is not so much the cause of that problem as the embodiment of it. He stands for what has gone wrong, and his ideological views, his party’s most powerful constituencies, and his policy commitments stand in the way of America’s future prosperity. 

A proper understanding of the nature of that problem would not only help to show voters why Obama must be sent packing, but would also reinforce the case for Romney’s particular strengths in this unusual moment. The Romney campaign has yet to make an overarching case for the candidate. They would be wise to notice that a careful assessment of what America lacks as a new global economic order takes shape could add up to just such a case. 

The American public knows that the nation’s economic prospects are in exceptional peril. Huge majorities of voters say that this recovery feels like a recession, that the country is on the wrong track, and that their children’s economic prospects seem dimmer than their own. There is more going on than a cyclical downturn. …

… America needs more than economic growth. But without growth, we cannot hope to take up our other priorities. With the crumbling of the liberal welfare state and the passing of the postwar economic order, we are badly in need of a new vision for growth. Barack Obama stands for the old order. If Mitt Romney chooses to stand for the new one—for American principles, drive, and ingenuity applied to our novel circumstances—America’s anxious electorate might just stand with him.

Janet Daily, writing in the Telegraph, UK, on the end of Europe’s utopian dream.

… As I write, Greece is experiencing what is now called a “bank jog” – a fairly slow “run”. By the time you read this, it may have become a sprint. How long before the (unelected) Greek government imposes a freeze on all bank accounts? Or exchange controls to prevent anyone taking or sending more than very small amounts of money out of the country? When will we start to see prosecutions for “economic crimes” in which the survival of the political project takes precedence over the right to access and make free use of your own funds? Not to mention tanks in the streets to control social unrest. The West may have won the Cold War but its own brand of utopian solution – the great economic and political union that would put an end to war and social instability – is toying dangerously with mechanisms that are certainly anti-democratic and come close to being totalitarian.

This is not just a story of bureaucratic grandiosity, or of German insistence on domination. Certainly it is true that there is an irreconcilable cultural clash between the more puritanical North and the, shall we say, more indulgent South. It turns out that Marx was wrong about economic conditions determining political behaviour: a nation’s religion and geography are much more likely to affect its economic attitudes than the other way round. But it is not the dream of European co-operation that was doomed from the start: given the ancient hatreds and unforgivable sins of the past, that was difficult, but it was not impossible. What has made the project unworkable is the insistence that the EU be a vehicle for democratic socialism: the impossible dream was not European unity but universal “social solidarity” stretching across a continent, for which the single market was simply a milch cow to produce the funds. …

Debra Saunders says Obama thinks he is fairness czar.

… Monday, a reporter asked Obama about Booker’s remarks and the role of private equity. The president explained that the goal of private investment is to “maximize profits,” whereas a president’s job is to make sure that everyone has “a fair shot” and that everyone pays his or her “fair share” of taxes.

That’s the problem with Obama: He thinks he’s the fairness czar. He didn’t say that presidents are supposed to create an environment that nurtures business success. He said a president is supposed to make sure that nobody walks away with too much.

When you’re president, Obama said, “your job is to think about those workers who get laid off and how are we paying for their retraining.” Obama’s war is a war on private money. He thinks his job is to create job-training programs, not create an environment that creates real jobs.

Victor Davis Hanson says if you’re cool, you can walk. Kinda like the cool president can make jokes about weed and blow, while his government locks up the unlucky.

When Barack Obama two years ago joked at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that potential suitors of his two daughters might have to deal with Predator drones (“But boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You will never see it coming.”), the liberal crowd roared. That failed macabre joke would have earned George W. Bush a week of headline condemnation from the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Obama, in fact, has increased those judge/jury/executioner targeted assassinations tenfold during his tenure. But apparently, the combination of Obama’s postracial “cool” and the video-game nature of such airborne death — no CNN clips of charred torsos and smoldering legs, no prisoners with their ACLU lawyers in Guantanamo, no Seymour Hersh exposé on a Waziristan granny who was vaporized for being too near her terrorist-suspect grandson, no American losses for Code Pink and Moveon.org to demonstrate against — earned general exemption for that new liberal way of war. What bothered us about the Predator strikes in 2006–2008 was not the kills per se but the uncool nature of twangy Texan George Bush, who ordered them.

Last week 28-year-old, $17 billion–rich, jeans-clad Mark Zuckerberg took Wall Street for a multibillion-dollar ride, making his original buddies instant billionaires and his loyal larger circle millionaires. Note that there is no Occupy Wall Street protest at Facebook headquarters. Just as there are none at Oprah’s house or the residence of Leonardo DiCaprio, despite their take each year of between $50 and $100 million.

No one has suggested that Hollywood lower movie-ticket prices by asking Johnny Depp or Jennifer Lopez to walk away with $10 or $20 million less a year. Steve Jobs found ways to dodge taxes comparable to those deployed by any Wall Street fatcat, but he was iPad cool, and so his iPhone billions were exempt from the Occupy nonsense. Cool capitalists are immune from the neo-Marxist critique of capitalism — a racket that $40 billion–rich Warren Buffett learned late in life, but well enough, with the “Buffett Rule.” …

If two days ago, you did not look at the video of Penn Jillette making the same point as Hanson above, here’s a second chance. Here’s Penn Jillette with his reasoning for ending the drug war. The language here is a little rough, but he was exercised about the juxtaposition of the people in jail with the nonchalant attitude of the president.

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Time for more Wisconsin news. Stephen Hayes has a detailed report.

Geeta Jensen had some exciting news: Governor Scott Walker was visiting Jensen Metal Products to announce the addition of 39 new jobs, part of a company-wide expansion accelerated by tax credits his administration had offered to encourage hiring.

“It is an honor to have the governor of the state of Wisconsin visit us in this, our 90th anniversary year,” she said in introducing Walker, her slight Indian accent marking her words. “When Jungbert Jensen immigrated to Wisconsin from Copenhagen, Denmark, around 1911, and started making rain gutters and milk pails out of a garage in Racine, he never imagined that his great-grandchildren would one day be hosting the governor of Wisconsin in the shop he started. But, well, here we are!”

When she finished her introduction, it was evident that a few of the 25 employees assembled for the brief ceremony did not share her enthusiasm. Most of the workers applauded the governor in a show of support that ranged from polite to fanatical. But a burly man in a black T-shirt celebrating the company’s 90th anniversary sat quietly staring at the floor as most of his colleagues clapped. A man to his left, wearing an old softball uniform with the arms cut off, folded his arms across his chest.

I asked Jensen about this after Walker’s brief remarks. She told me that four of the company’s longest-serving employees told her they considered the Walker visit a “slap in the face.” They asked to be excused during Walker’s visit but were told that his appearance was more about jobs than politics. They were given the choice of coming to the announcement or working. They attended but didn’t seem thrilled. Walker is used to this.

To say that Wisconsin is divided—even deeply divided—doesn’t quite capture the intensity of the feelings here less than a month before the recall vote. In Brule, “up north” in the sparsely populated northwest corner of the state, the low-key owner of a funeral home kicked off an annual fly-fishing trip with a prayer that included a strong plea for divine intervention on Walker’s behalf. Across the state to the east, a previously apolitical entrepreneur put up a pro-Walker sign and opened his establishment to the local Republican party for fear that his business could not survive a return to higher taxes and more regulations under the state’s Democrats. Virtually everyone you talk to here can tell you a story about lifelong friends who are no longer on speaking terms because of opposing views on the governor. (Indeed, one recent poll found that 3 in 10 Wisconsinites say they have ended relationships themselves.) Tavern owners report regular disputes among customers that range from muttered comments to full-scale shouting matches. And worse. ..

… Walker has few regrets about his short tenure as governor. He says he’s learned from the experience and says that if he had it to do over again he’d spend more time explaining the process to Wisconsinites before moving to implement the reforms. But when I asked him whether there’s a part of him that wishes he hadn’t pursued the reforms to balance the budget, he’s resolute, then reflective. “On substance? No,” he says. Then he pauses. “A friend of mine, a supporter, asked me: ‘Do you ever think that if you hadn’t gone so far you might not be facing recall?’ And I thought about it. If I hadn’t gone so far, I wouldn’t have fixed it. I’m running to win. I’m doing everything in my power to win. But I’m not afraid to lose. To me, it’s not worth being in a position like this if you’re not willing to do things to fix it. And that means sometimes not worrying about whether or not it’s going to help you win or lose.”

Still, he wants to win. Speaking to volunteers that afternoon at a Walker “victory center” in Waukesha, the governor acknowledges the new polls and his impressive showing in the primary and offers his supporters a word of caution. “Do not let apathy be the thing that defeats us on June 5,” he says, urging the volunteers to keep up their efforts. “There are a lot of hardworking taxpayers in this state who for the past 15, 16 months have been sitting on their hands and saying, ‘You know, I don’t need a bullhorn, I don’t need a protest sign, I can let my words be heard in the election, at the ballot box.’ We just need to make sure that all those voices show up on June 5.” …

Jennifer Rubin has more.

Given current polling, it is not surprising that Democrats in Wisconsin are freaking out. The Wall Street Journal reports: “With little more than two weeks until Wisconsin’s gubernatorial recall election, some Democratic and union officials quietly are expressing fears that they have picked a fight they won’t win and that could leave lingering injuries.” No one is bothering to claim a Scott Walker victory would be insignificant:

The election has taken on significance beyond Wisconsin state politics: Organized labor sees the battle as a major stand against GOP efforts to scale back collective-bargaining rights for public-sector workers, as Mr. Walker did after taking office in 2011. Some Democrats now fear mobilizing Republicans to battle the recall could carry over to help the party — and Republican Mitt Romney — in November’s presidential election. .?.?.

And Jennifer posts on the Cory Booker flap.

On Sunday, Newark Mayor Cory Booker told the country on “Meet The Press” that the president’s attacks on Bain were “nauseating.” If that wasn’t bad enough, the Obama campaign dug itself deeper by trying to clean up the mess. Booker was obliged to record a four-minute video that didn’t make things much better, as Politico noted. He didn’t renounce, and indeed he repeated, his assertion that negative ads were nauseating.

So the Obama campaign edited what will surely be hereafter called the “Booker hostage video” into a 35-second video that left out the continued criticism of negative campaigning. In sum, as Politico’s Dylan Byers writers:

 ’What gets lost in the edit is the nuance of Booker’s argument. Watching the 35-second video, you would believe that Booker was flip-flopping from his comments on Meet The Press and going on an all-out assault on Romney. In the four-minute video, Booker stands by his comments — including “nauseating” — and explains that while he does think Romney’s record is fair game, he remains “frustrated” by the Obama campaign’s negative attacks. ‘

Let’s count the ways Obama’s team has messed this up. …

Ms Rubin lists the ten ways you can know the Bain attacks have bombed for Bam.

Unless you’ve really drunk the Kool-Aid, you probably have the idea that the President Obama’s campaign has misfired on the Bain attack. How can you tell? Well:

1. Democratic critics of the Bain attack are piling up.

2. Politico, the ultimate home team paper (root for those to whom you want access), has gone pro-Romney, big time. (h/t David Freddoso)

3. Chris Matthews is having a meltdown. …

Jonathan Tobin posts on Booker’s walk back.

Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker is a rising star in New Jersey whose record running the city has earned him applause on both sides of the political aisle. He’s also thought of as something of a superhero after personally rescuing two neighbors from their burning home last month. But as far as the Obama re-election campaign is concerned, he has no more right to think as he pleases than Winston Smith, the hero of George Orwell’s 1984. Just as Smith was forced to concede that two plus two equals five if Big Brother said it did, so Booker tamely walked back his criticism of the president’s re-election campaign ads lambasting Mitt Romney’s business record. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: London police will use high-pitched, painful sounds to disperse Olympic crowds if necessary. As ‘The View’ women put it, ‘Looks like we’re going to the Olympics.’

Conan: A janitor has just graduated from Columbia University with honors as a Classics major. With this new degree in Classics, he’s now qualified to become a janitor.

Fallon: CNN’s ratings have hit a 15-year low. In fact, things are so bad at CNN, that Wolf Blitzer has started renting out ‘The Situation Room’ for birthday parties.

Leno: Widespread disappointment over Facebook shares on their first day of NASDAQ trading. Experts said they’d take off like a rocket. But it was more like a North Korean rocket.